Kids are thick. Really thick. Thicker than mud combined with gravy granules and several increasingly short planks (which do admittedly make the concoction rather lumpy). Perhaps you’ll protest at the sweeping generalisation of this statement; children are sweet little individual snowflakes who need to blossom under gentle encouragement in an environment where they feel able to ask intelligent (or otherwise) questions. That’s the way it works, you come into the world as a helpless drooling baby and the path to becoming a wise drooling adult is paved with countless hours of learning. On the other hand, you might well agree with me that these chronologically challenged humans are a very long way away from being deemed bright. And I should know, I used to be a child.
As always, there is a method in my madness (well, there usually is, there generally has to be some reason behind whatever I’m doing or I probably wouldn’t be doing it now would I?), an inspiration for this post. I recently went back to school. I didn’t stay very long, I was only there because it was the location for a film shoot (I have to shoehorn in any hint of glamour, no matter how faint). But it gave me the opportunity (because I really didn’t have very much to do) to pry into some exercise books (I was really bored).
Their spelling is truly atrocious. But the terrible thing is that the teachers seem to be letting it slide. Now I know how disheartening the life of a teacher is, my dad was one until he took early retirement and he’s put me off the profession entirely but isn’t that basically their job? If they’re not going to take the time to correct the children every time they make even the slightest mistake who is? That wasn’t even the worst of it, the spelling errors sometimes even end up on the walls. Unless the project in question was about a particular very fair minded family rather than civil liberties.
The Ros Martin Archive 